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Couldn't get much work done today, but confirmed that the height should be fine, and stared a 3D print for the backplate but I won't be able to work on it or update until at least the beginning of January, sorry for the lack of progress but hopefully it should be done soon after I can start work again!

The main plan for the buttons is to just get an old USB 2.0 male to male cable, cut it in half and solder it to the button board on the PS2, the pin placement is the same on the front panel port on the motherboard. The other half will be used for the controller boards

Couldn't do much today but I'd figure I better give an update, The heatsink was cut down (ended up using a band saw to cut it) to a level that should be low enough to fit it in the case, part of the soldering of the controller ports is finished, some other small things, there will be one last update on Monday but after that there will be a break until after Christmas break (probably nothing until the beginning of January).

Completely forgot to take pictures today, but progress is being made, the case is mostly done being cut and the controlller port usb adapters are both ready for soldering to the inputs on thursday, the plan is to run the USB wires from them directly into a USB 2.0 header on the board, the biggest thing left to do is the milling of the GPU heatsink in order to meet height clearances and wiring up the bottom board in order for it to work with the motherboard, we are planning to not just keep the buttons but the LEDs as well. edit: I found an actual schematic lol

So, the listing was legit (or at least I think, everything looks right, none of the connects look damaged or anything, and it even has the smart card (both slot and contactless). Minor scuffs but boots fine on external display and has the correct CPU/GPU... here are some pictures of it and comparison to my Inspiron gaming.

Another Update!
Desoldered the controller ports/memory card ports from the board attached to them where they connect to the PS2, the plan is to solder the usb adapters upright to save space while keeping the original ports intact, also cut the case a bit more to make room for the board, after we shave the GPU's heatsink down 5mm or so everything should fit, something interesting we just discovered was the WiFi antennas hold the Wireless card inside the metal housing as well, it's just a normal m.2 Wifi card... interesting... Next update should be Monday, though we won't be able to cut down the GPU heatsink until around Tuesday. Also picked up a 40x20MM noctua fan to increase cooling hopefully.

yeah, I figured you couldn't easily adapt the DA-2, but as for the barrel jack power supplies, if I need one, ill probably just buy a dell 240W one, but I'm hoping I don't (though the TDP of just the CPU/GPU combined is 120W so....) as for the MXM slots, according to the Mobile PCIe Wiki page you can pull 200W from a 3.0B slot, which is a ton, though type b is usually only on high end and larger machines, from what I've found 15 inch machines usually only have 3.0 type A which is limited to 55W, even then most cards have a TDP of 100W or less (except maybe higher end 10 series cards, the 1080 in some of MSI's high end laptops apparently can draw 195+ Watts...). And with barrel connectors, yeah they are kind of hit or miss, you have to not just find one that has the right connector, but the right voltage and polarity, the HP one you sent actually looks like a good option, its the same 19.5V and outside negative polarity while being like 1/2 the cost of the dell one, though I've heard of dell laptops refusing to charger because they detected it's not a dell charger (based off the sense pin in the middle of the Dell ones). Another discovery I just found is that there is a brick used for the old alienware laptops that is 330W but uses the same connector and voltage, part number is XM3C3.

Yeah, the 130W adapters I have are the chargers I got for my Inspiron Gaming, I was talking about using them the charge the precision, not for the eGPU setup, I already planned to buy one of those DA-2 Adapters to power the GPU, the internal Firepro card draws ~75W where as the 980m draws ~100W that's what I was referring to about the laptop without eGPU drawing 130+ Watts, thinking about it now I wonder if there is a way to adapt the DA-2's connector to a normal Dell barrel jack because they are a lot cheaper than 240W bricks for laptops. (I'm in class, so Ill finish this response when I get home in 90 minutes or so :). )

RIP the 680
Yeah, I'm in the same boat of 'I want a higher performance laptop but financially it doesn't make sense' I could buy a laptop with comparable CPU and GPU (7700hq is a bit better, 1060 Mobile) for $1150 but that's a lot of money when I could spend <$100 on a dock, PSU, and have very similar performance, the only place I take my laptop is school and over to friend's places/vacation, which I wouldn't need an eGPU at school (I could use the Firepro 'basically a 960m' for stuff there), and I could just take the dock + PSU if I needed the extra performance. The other solution is a lot cheaper, but again is less performance: I could buy a 980m MXM card to slap into the Precision, but these run $300+ and again, it's much better financially to run eGPU with a GPU I already have, plus then I'd need better laptop chargers (I still might, Idk is 130W will cut it under intense load, but I hope so as I have 2 of them...), which for some reason aren't cheap (like really?! $45 for a used charger!) added a bunch of comparisons for userbenchmark (Passmark results are very similar)
If you could test it with another GPU that would be helpful but don't feel rushed, I'm not planning on ordering anything for 3+ weeks...
edit: I forgot to mention that for your setup there might be a bottleneck, userbenchmark reports the 3320m having ~15% better single core, but the Phenom II having 78% multicore, I would say at least a bit of that 15% performance loss is CPU related, probably not all of it though...

Thanks! Yeah, I always loved the idea of eGPU because of convenience (yeah, I know, sounds a bit backwards), considering the M6700 has 2 2.5in sata bays and an mSATA ssd port there should be plenty of storage space (and if I need more, I could replace the ODD with a HDD as well.) this means instead of going somewhere just to realize I forgot to copy something I was working on or forgot to install a game, I can just have all my files and games on one machine, that can be simply undocked and taken with me. Some of the arguments against eGPUs I've seen are mainly focused on that "you're spending $200+ on a gpu, why only use it to 80% of its potential?" and my answer to that is because I'm already using it to 80% of it's potential because my CPU is bad anyway XD. Oh @Ross Siggers, your Thinkpad is 3rd gen as well, so you should have Expresscard 2.0, what dock are you using? If you're using the EXP GDC 8.0 could you send a screenshot from GPUz I can't find anything on if V8.0 does 4Gb/s (PCIe 2.0 x1) or if it is limited to 2Gb/s (PCIe 1.1 x1).
Edit: A few more questions, What CPU does the 'ATX Gaming PC' have? Is the 15% performance loss exclusively because of Expresscard/eGPU or is it because of CPU Bottlenecking?

How do I start this, well, I guess by saying that I know a laptop isn't really a 'build' per say, but I hope you understand why I classify it as one after reading this introduction.
Backstory:
I have been interested in the older (2012-2014) Dell Precision laptops because of their still ok CPUs and upgradable MXM GPUs while having a ridiculous amount of built in I/O (the M6700 has 14 ports without the dock, 31 with the dock!). Another thing that peaked my interest was eGPUs for laptops, especially the idea of Expresscard, a port that external and therefore doesn't require the laptop to be disassembled in order to plug in the cable. I have been browsing eBay for M6700s (because they are very similar to M6800s but I know there is a 120Hz panel for them and they are quite a bit cheaper than the M6800s) for a while now and finally found one that works perfectly for what I was planning. I was planning to upgrade the display, keyboard, CPU, GPU, RAM, basically the lot, but I found one listed for cheap that didn't have a display, RAM, Storage, Keyboard, and a few other things, (plus it had the 3D display cable & fingerprint reader installed, so I didn't have to buy them!) so I bought it.... (I attached some photos from the listing) and set about my plan to rebuild my new laptop.
The Plan:
(Some of this is already outlined above). I have a google sheets file that has a list of all the stuff I believe I'll need. I started doing some research into upgrades people have done and discovered the K3100M in the laptop just wasn't going to be useful for just about anything, then I discovered the Firepro M6100, a $35 GPU that is basically a 960M.... (interesting as that's what my current laptop has) and added it to the list, then I discovered some cool things like the Precision (with a supported WWAN card) can do 4G LTE and added the card to the list. About a day or 2 ago I remembered that it also has Expresscard 2.0 @ 4.0Gb/s which doesn't sound like much, especially comparing it to thunderbolt 3's 40Gb/s but that meant I could do a simple undock and reboot to attach and detach the GPU, plus from what I've gathered the performance loss isn't that much and the laptop's CPU (an i7 3720qm) is actually better than my desktop's i5 4430... So the main plan is to buy all the stuff in Red, Orange, and Yellow in order to hopefully have a functioning eGPU setup with the 480 from my desktop.
Other Stuff:
There has been people getting eGPUs to work on M6500s and even the m6700 is listed under compatible laptops for the PE4C eGPU dock so theoretically if it works for that it should work for the EXP GDC dock as well.
This post (https://www.techinferno.com/index.php?/forums/topic/11256-14-dell-5430-rx-4808gb4gbps-ec2-exp-gdc-v84d-win10-unrealmitch/) shows benchmarks for an RX 480 over Expresscard 2.0 @4 Gb/s (though it's a latitude with a 3320m) with minimal performance loss
Edit: I guessed I should have mentioned that I don't have the laptop yet and that's why I don't have pictures of it, plus this post is a bit early as I'm not getting any of this until we get back from visiting family in another country, so there probably won't be updates until at least after the 27th of Dec...

I don't know about fitting a 3.5in HDD, but here are some rough measurements, keep in mind that there are plastic bits holding it together, so you lose about 15 MM on the side that doesn't have the jut-out

Another Update! Not a big one this time, discovered that we can fit a 30mm fan and 2 50mm fans back-to-back to pull hot air out, also talked about using panel mount USB ports instead of just extensions, the GPU heatsink is going to have to be cut a few millimeters shorter to make clearance with the ram and audio jacks, there should be another update come monday